Áile Aikio

Áile Aikio has been curator in the Sámi Museum Siida since 2005. Aikio has a master’s degree on Ethnology and she is a Doctoral Candidate in the University of Lapland. The theme for her Ph.D. dissertation is how to Sámify Museum, what would be the Sámi way to present Sámi culture in Indigenous Sámi Museum. Aikio is interested in indigenizing and decolonizing processes, especially how to indigenize cultural heritage institutions.

Rastá rájiid. Could Indigenous viewpoints help to detect blind spots and unnecessary borders in museum?

Museum is full of borders. By drawing borders, we define museum compared to other heritage institutions. And thus, we divide museum field to smaller sectors of responsibility. We have created borders between art museums and cultural historical museums, as well as borderlines what is heritage and definitions what is art and what is not. Over time, these borders have become universal, inevitable and even crucial for our work in museums.

According to the 1986 Åre Sámi Conference declaration “sámit lea oktasaš čearda, eaige riikkaid rájit galgga rihkkut min čeardda oktavuoða (We, the Sámi, are one people and the borders of the national states shall not break our unity)”. Ever since, this declaration has been shared by every Sámi conference that has been held. By this declaration the Sámi define themselves as a people without borders, as a people who live their life despite the borders others have drawn, on top of them or even in-between the borderlines.

In this paper, I will apply this Sámi worldview to the borders, set by others, to museum context. I will demonstrate my point by presenting cases on how the Sámi understanding and knowledge can collide with the borders in museum world discarding the Sámi understanding in museum and thus further induce neglect towards the Sámi heritage. The themes I wish to present are the Sámi relationship to nature, idea of Sámi cultural landscape, Sámi holistic understanding of material and immaterial cultural heritage and the relationship between Sámi art and duodji, Sámi handicrafts.

With the help of my cases, I suggest that a gaze from Indigenous Sámi point of view can help us to recognize blind spots and unnecessary borders in museum and museum practices. The Sámi gaze can help us to understand that there are methods, practices and borderlines in museum that can have a negative impact on our work. I urge that instead of seeing limitations, we should see possibilities and instead of seeing borders as permanent obstacles, we should realize that they are imaginary and manmade. In addition, I will present how to intermediate Sámi understanding to museum context and suggest what would be a Sámi museum, museum built on Sámi worldview, values and needs.

Reija Eeva

Cultural Historian (M.A.), Conservator (B.A.). Head of Collections and Research in Lappeenranta Museums. Reija Eeva has been working as a curator responsible for museums object collection in Lappeenranta Museums since 2009. She is interested in the cross-country relationship between Finland and Russia, and has been working with Finnish Karelian Isthmus related material.

The Cultural Border of the East and West in the South Karelia Museum’s Collections

The South Karelia Museum preserves the cultural heritage of South Karelia and the areas of Karelia ceded to the Soviet Union, from Jaakkima to Terijoki (known as Zelenogorsk in Russian). The location of the ceded area of Karelia at the cultural border of the east and west brought the region cultural contact with and influences from the east. Also, the proximity of St. Petersburg and the changes in the border between Finland and Russia throughout history have made elements relating to Russia and the Russian culture an integral part of the everyday lives of the region’s residents. Eastern influences and life within the orbit of the St. Petersburg metropolis are also discernible in the cultural heritage preserved by the South Karelia Museum.

From the border changes of 1721 and 1743 until 1917, the entire geographical area whose history the museum preserves was strongly influenced by the St. Petersburg metropolis. In the museum’s collections, this period presents itself as one of close connections to St. Petersburg. It was an important market for Finnish food and other products. Many residents of the Karelian Isthmus also sought work and a livelihood in the city.

The period from 1917 to 1944, in turn, focused on the building of a Finnish identity in the vicinity of the border. Finns were fearful of the Soviet Union, the new state next door, and the border was reinforced by enticing domestic tourists to the border region in Terijoki. The medieval, Swedish history of Vyborg was emphasised. Elsewhere in the Karelian Isthmus, the focus was still on agriculture, which had been the region’s traditional livelihood for centuries. Instead of St. Petersburg, new markets had to be found in Finland. In the museum’s collections, the period of independence in the Karelian Isthmus appears as urbanisation, changes in livelihoods and a search for a distinct national identity.

The lost areas of Karelia and especially ceding the second largest town in Finland, Vyborg, with the Moscow Armistice in 1944 gave rise to a period of mystification and longing for Karelia, with the accompanying memories and travels of Karelian evacuees to their home district. The evacuated Karelia residents did not have time to take anything but their most important belongings along. The articles and photographs they managed to save became unique memories of their lost home. After the Winter and Continuation Wars, the cultural heritage material from the lost region increased in value. Old residents of Vyborg founded the Vyborg Museum Foundation and began fundraising for a scale model of Vyborg, today on view at the South Karelia Museum, and for a collection of articles and photographs from the city and elsewhere in the Karelian Isthmus.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of the new Russia have brought fresh points of view on the museum’s work to preserve history. The Russians have discovered the Finnish cultural heritage of the lost regions and Finns have become interested in a more open way in their neighbour and their shared cultural heritage. Where South Karelia Museum is making co-operation with many Russian museums in Karelian Isthmus, North Karelia Museum in Joensuu is making co-operation with museums of Russian Karelia.

Inkeri Hakamies

Inkeri Hakamies is an ethnologist and a doctoral candidate from the University of Helsinki. She studies museum practices and asks, what sort meanings they have. The research is based on oral history interviews and a questionnaire, produced as part of a Finnish Museum History Project in the early 2000s.

Bordering Museum Practices

My study deals with borders within museums, created through museum work practices. For many museum professionals, being able to participate in certain practices, such as hands-on collection work or exhibition planning, can be a corner stone for their professional identity. Likewise, shared practices are a way of defining the other – those who do not participate in the same practices. Thus, practices create borders between different communities in the museum field. Practices related to museum work are also linked to producing a museum and reflect different ideas of a museum.

In my presentation, I would like to discuss how this division-by-practices functions. Is it unavoidable, and is it even a bad thing?

The study is part of my on-going PhD-research, in which is study the meanings of museum practices in the recent Finnish museum history. The material consists of biographical interviews of museum professionals, produced as part of a Finnish Museum History Project in early 2000’s. The presentation suggested here would be in the form of a PowerPoint.

Sanne Houby-Nielsen

Sanne Houby-Nielsen, PhD

Styresman/director - Nordiska Museet, Stockholm

The Nordic museum in Stockholm: A Nordic perspective in a globalized world. Thoughts about the museum

The founder of the Nordiska museet (Nordic museum) in Stockholm, Artur Hazelius, approached the cultural history of Sweden from a Nordic perspective as seemed natural at his time. Today, almost 150 years later, a Nordic perspective is much less self-evident among people living in the Nordic countries than was the case during Hazelius’ lifetime. Yet, museum visitors from outside the Nordic countries tend to view Nordic countries from a ‘Nordic’ perspective rather than a ‘national’ one. In my key-note lecture, I will put forward arguments why a trans-national museum, such as the Nordic museum, is particularly suited to capture and understand long-term cultural historical developments, and why such trans-national perspectives are now very much needed. In dealing with the role of trans-national museums, I will make comparisons to other trans-national museums and I will give examples of some of the recent initiatives which have been taken at the Nordic museum relating to a variety of topics ranging from climate changes in the Arctic, to migration issues and changes in fashion and dress codes in Sweden.

Finland’s demographics are set to change dramatically with regards to its growing number of seniors. Seniors make up a notable portion of the visitors to museums. The majority of senior visitors are 65 to 75 years old, well-off, digi-tally-minded and active individuals who look forward to taking part in the activities museum’s offer. Due to the chal-lenges created by the ageing population, efforts are made to actively develop and promote access to cultural ser-vices. For many, it may be impossible to participate in cultural events in the city centre due to mobility, and financial issues.

The museums activities in the suburbs are often sporadic due to a scarcity of resources. For many museums re-sources are nearly insufficient for creating productions within the museum’s walls. No to mention, that these dimin-ishing assets would be transferred to the suburbs along with the museum staff. Although, it would be important to maintain a presence there, where people live. The question is then, how to finance targeted customer segment ser-vices in the suburbs?

According to my own observations and experiences, services geared for the suburbs do not necessarily require large sums of money, but require more diverse cooperation and the readiness for a new kind of approach. Several of the city’s administrative bodies are working in the suburban areas, each of which have their own planning mod-els and well-established division of labour. Therefore a cross-sectoral and administrative suburban working group, which could, for example, contain one or more representatives from local museums could be a solution. With the aid of the suburban working group, it would be possible to work together, share resources and allocate financial responsibility for the work among the different actors and administrative bodies, to define responsibilities and areas of collaboration. By being in direct contact with the residents and residential actors in the suburban working group, information can be obtained, which will help to develop and connect the services to the needs of the residents. Territorial segregation could be addressed and equal distribution of culture among the population, including senior citizens, would be promoted.

Museums could reach the widest possible group of people, with the help of cross-sectoral organisation facilitating cooperation for content management, service delivery and service intermediaries, including home care and visual artists. Working cross-administratively and cross-sectorally, and cooperating with the health, social care and third sector, is one solution to the question of resources. Health services should invest more in leisure activities, bringing museum and culture professionals into the health and social care sector. This could benefit all parties involved, meeting health, social and cultural aims and functioning as a preventive, action-oriented operation.

Oona Ilmolahti

Oona Ilmolahti is a historian interested in communities, emotions and cultural heritage. At the moment she is working as a postdoctoral researcher in the project Lively Border. Nature Tourism and History Politics in the Finnish-Russian-Norwegian Border Region (University of Eastern Finland) on themes concerning nature and memory institutions in Karelia.

Connections, Cultural Heritage and the Weight of the Past: Museums and Nature on the Eastern Border

The Finnish Eastern Border carries many meanings both politically and mentally and is in many ways difficult to cross. The cultural border on the other hand is much more flexible. Nature follows its own course, and many traditions and beliefs have common features. How do Finnish museums value, evaluate and pass on their eastern heritage, and what prejudices, obstacles – and positive aspects – they encounter?

Lise Skytte Jakobsen, Ane Hejlskov, Brita Brenna

Ane Hejlskov Larsen is senior researcher at Aarhus University. Since 2001 she has been the head of the Center for Museology at the Department of Art History, Aesthetic and Culture & Museology. In her research she focuses on art museums as organizations and their dissemination and is author and co-author of anthologies and articles about Danish museums and new museology. From 2005-2012 Ane Hejlskov Larsen was the main editor for the Nordic journal Nordisk Museologi.

Brita Brenna is professor and the head of the Museology programme at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. Her main research interest has been the intersection between material culture and history of knowledge. Since 2013 Brita Brenna has been the chief editor of Nordisk Museologi.

Lise Skytte Jakobsen is an associate professor in Museology and Art History at Aarhus University, Denmark. In her museological research she has focused on how objects are organized within collections (Ophobninger, 2005), and lately on how museums can use 3D printing for dissemination purposes (“Flip-flopping museum objects from physical to digital – and back again”, 2016).

Disciplinary borders within museology

Museology is a cross-disciplinary discipline, which has played very diverse roles in the development of different academic disciplines such as Archaeology, History, Art History etc. But how do we secure a critical and sustainable interchange between these disciplines and museology?

In her book The Disobedient Museum (2018) Kylie Message argues that Museum Studies has stagnated and forgotten to ask central questions to itself as a discipline. She provocatively suggests that university disciplines and museums have come too close to each other, have become too alike. Is it time to mark the borders between museums and museology, and other university disciplines, more clearly in order to secure a critical awareness and relevance for both?

With this panel, we discuss:
• The status and function of museology within different disciplines.
• How can/should these disciplines feed the development of Museology/Museum studies as a university discipline and programme in the 2020s?
• What should the borders and responsibilities be between museums and universities in this development?

Centre for Museology at Aarhus University invited colleagues from a large range of different disciplines to reflect upon the relationship between their research areas and museology in 2017 and the group is momentarily preparing a publication due to be published in 2019 with these contributions. A short presentation of some of the key insights developed out of this process will be given as introduction to the panel by the moderator.

Simon Knell

Simon Knell is a Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. He says he is a museologist, historian and geographer who studies knowledge communities, looking at their constructive use of objects, institutions and disciplinary culture. He tells his interests extend globally and currently concern the situated nature of art: its production, construction, representation and consumption. Standing outside of the art world and looking in on the performances of art institutions and actors, my work complements that of art historians concerned with global modernisms.

Situatedness

‘I don't think there are any borders when it comes to painting. I've always thought that. There are no frontiers. Just art.’ Even if we have no interest in art, we might agree with the cosmopolitan idealism that underpins this recent statement by British artist, David Hockney. However, Hockney’s paintings are indisputably the product of his bordered situation; of delimited geographical, historical, climatic, social, sexual, familial, architectural and educational circumstance. Implicitly and tacitly, but also explicitly, his work speaks of a differentiated world; a world of borders and transgressions, and it does so not simply in its form, style or subject matter. His posthumous legacy will also be shaped by territories, as represented by the canonical ambitions of museums and the nation-state: Hockney is now referred to by that playful and slightly ironic British category, ‘national treasure’.

Cosmopolitan idealism, of course, has ethical appeal to an empowered Western actor but its impact in other parts of the world is as a form of neo-colonialism, denying other cultural identities and forms of cultural production. While popular books of modern painting show how a Paris-centred West invented everything, the world’s art museums reveal something quite different: that art’s history has been performed, developed and written within nation-states. That hasn’t stopped artists, art historians and museums in those countries believing in the truth of the West’s limited internationalism and embracing its hegemonic and homogenising ideology. Cultural imperialism is performed through ideas. It easily crosses borders.

However, a counter position that sees the nation as delimiting our understanding of cultural production has, of course, its own dangers which any European can understand: nationalism’s warm, affirmative sense of home breeds racial, ethnic, territorial and religious intolerance and conflict. To human beings perpetually in search of meaning and purpose, affirmative ideologies are seductive. They permit and encourage identity and border formation. Museums have often legitimised themselves as sites of identity formation but I would argue that their role is to demystify the human condition and the political myths and ideologies that limit our potential, breed irrationalism and undermine our creative potential. Our relationship to borders needs to be informed: a privileging of a situated sense of place is critical to encouraging and respecting diverse cultural production without nationalism. Borders need to be imagined and maintained as porous and transitional, permitting both the flow of ideas, respect for other cultures and on-going cultural diplomacy.

Susanne Krogh Jensen

Susanne Krogh Jensen holds a master in History from the University of Copenhagen and has a background as a curator at the Danish Immigration Museum. She is currently a PhD fellow at UCPH researching the professionalization of the Danish museum field since the 1950s.

Culture, nature and art – the development and demise of professional borders within the Danish museum field from the 1950s until today.

In 1975, the National Oversight for Local Museums in Denmark defined museum work as consisting of collection, preservation and mediation. They further stated that while collecting and preservation to some degree was dependent on both the academic discipline and the topic of the individual museums, mediation was the common denominator for museum work in both cultural, natural and art museums. Furthermore, in 1976 a Museum Act including all three branches of the museum field was passed – indicating the existence of a joint museum field. Nevertheless, over the years the art museums have repeatedly argued for a separate art museum law and the present debate in Denmark about the future organization of the museum field, have also raised the question of further collaboration between different types of museums, attesting to ongoing challenges in the collaboration across academic and professional borders within the museum field.

In this paper, I analyze and discuss the development of such professional and academic borders within the Danish museum field since the 1950s. Based on a number of interviews with influential museum professionals from both cultural, natural and art museums as well as on legislation, job ads, archives from the museum associations and debates within and about the museum field, I map and discuss differences in the perception and prioritization of key terms such as collection, research, mission and mediation. Focusing specifically on the latter, I ask how cultural, natural and art museums have distinguished themselves and have been distinguished by tradition, legislation and organizational borders, and how differences in perceptions can account for changes in the power balance between the museum branches over time. Finally, I discuss whether the borders between the museum branches have now been abolished with the introduction of new technologies, user participation and the requirement for current, relevant and sustainable museums.

Sanna-Mari Niemi

Sanna-Mari Niemi is studying for a PhD within the University of Helsinki's Doctoral programme for philosophy, arts and society. She's interested in cross-disciplinary research of museum exhibition narratives and spatial storytelling.

Telling new (hi)stories in museums

The museum law and ethical statements of ICOM highlight the mission of museums in conveying reliable, unbiased, research-based information. Yet museums are ideological actors that have social impact, and they use this power most visibly through their exhibitions. In recent decades, new types of museum exhibition narratives have emerged and sometimes blur boundaries between historical facts and fiction in favour of visitor engagement. In some cases, textual narrative goes beyond basic visitor information and takes emphasized roles, thus becoming a vital part of contents and meanings of exhibitions. But what are the risks and possibilities of bringing a higher level of storytelling and fiction into museum exhibitions? Are museums risking their institutional role in their current search for new audiences? Where to draw the line between telling fascinating stories and communicating research-based information?

The questions of mediation and museum ethics are topical as museums are constantly pursuing a more democratic, participatory dialogue that would be inspiring for visitors. Microhistory, personal stories, but also artistic or literary interventions can be considered in relation with the growing interest of bringing multiple voices into museums. These can serve as a reminder that both history writing and museum work are full of decisions, choices and omissions. Whose histories do we want to tell and hear?

The presentation draws links to my on-going doctoral research in the University of Helsinki about fictional museum narratives as interpretive strategies in mediating the collections and missions of museums, and my master’s thesis about the use of fictional storytelling in Finnish museums. I argue that museum exhibitions have unique narrative potential because they provide a fully embodied multimedia experience with authentic objects.

Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt

Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt is a professor at the University of Malmö.

Public, audiences or visitors? Interdisciplinary look on people in and around museums.

How do we distinguish between different groups of people in and around museums? What kind of disciplinary differences allow us to shed light of different people? And is this differentiation fruitful? This presentation will look into the different paradigms of discussions when it comes to looking at the people in the museum. The traditional understanding of visitors’ places them often with a certain distance – like good guests in our house, they are welcome, but are expected to leave after certain time without leaving too many traces behind. At the same time, the paradigm shift in audience studies (Livingstone, 2013) towards more participatory audiences together with the need to reevaluate museums’ role in society brings us to looking for new words in relation to people in museums. This presentation will discuss the ideas and usefulness of audience studies tools and vocabulary in relation to museums.
In this presentation, I will discuss people in museum from five different types of relationships where each approach looks at more engaged role in the museum. The articulation of these relations strives to avoid normativity and rather sees these different levels as repertoires potentially always present in different forms.
Based on various disciplines, different approaches to the people will allow us to look at the following concepts: 1. The concept of public, which emphasizes the civic role and place of the museum. 2. The concept of audiences in plural sense from media studies to discuss the level of changed engagement to the issues related to the museums. 3. The concept of visitors directly familiar from the museum studies with its limitations and possibilities. 4. The concept of users, borrowed and expanded from the digital communication, but also highlighting the active role of the people in taking heritage to an active engagement level. 5. The concept of co-creators, inspired by participatory design research.
The presentation aims to highlight the differences in the paradigmatic approaches whether people are looked at potential public, audiences, visitors, users or co-creators as these words and labels play a role in institutional treatment and create borders between what is allowed and what not. At the same time, the discussion proposes some ideas as to how to move between the different concepts so that the repertoires of the museums could be enhanced from the discursive diversity.

Pille Runnel, Agnes Aljas

Dr Pille Runnel is Research Director and Deputy Director of the Estonian National Museum. Runnel supervised the production of new research-based permanent exhibitions at the Estonian National Museum (opened 2016), which were visited by 300,000 visitors during the first year after the opening. Her research has dealt with information society and new media audiences, museum communication and participation at public cultural institutions.

Agnes Aljas is Research Secretary of the Estonian National Museum, where she is manager and curator. Her research focusses on cultural institutions and museums from the side of participants and visitors.

Research vs exhibitions? Challenges of producing permanent exhibitions as academic collaboration: the case of the Estonian National Museum

At 2016 the new building of the Estonian National Museum was opened to the public. The new facilities gained attention in the architectural and design world as well as among the general audience. From the organisational point of view, opening the new building was a milestone, rather than a destination point of the transformation processes.

While the renewal of museums accross Eastern Europe has helped to recognise them as increasingly important part of leisure industry and economic sector at large, many museums continue to be research-driven institutions, tools to approach contemporary complex societies, meeting points of different knowledge production regimes and forms of expertise represented by museum, academic institutions and industries. It is up to the museums to solve the question of balancing different activities, functions and participants.

This paper presents a case study of producing the permanent exhibitions for the new museum building of the Estonian National Museum, which was carried out in a close collaboration of museum and researchers from different Estonian universities. We explore, in which ways museum exhibitions and academic research was connected, whether curatorship was perceieved as a part of research work or just a way of communicating research results to the general audience, what kind of collaborations appeared and what kind of barriers had to be crossed to achieve the expected results.

The academia is increasingly expected to communicate their work to the general public, but often the main approaches are limited to traditional public lecturing or writing popular articles. In contrast to that, museums offer a unique potential as laboratories for extending the ways to carrying out and communicating one’s research. But is crossing the familiar disciplinary borders of one’s academic disciplines safe, or can the message be lost in translation?

Katriina Siivonen, Marjukka Parkkinen, Satu Tuittila

Katriina Siivonen is Adjunct Professor in Cultural Heritage Studies and University Lecturer and Responsible Teacher in Futures Studies at University of Turku. She focusses on traditions, cultural heritage, heritage futures, cultural sustainability, semiotic theory of culture, cultural identities, ethnography as well as qualitative and participatory futures methodology.

Satu Tuittila is a grant researcher at University of Jyväskylä and a freelance dance artist and teacher based in Turku area. She has recently graduated from futures studies MA program in University of Turku and has worked as project researcher in futures workshops projects particularly in museum field. She is currently interested in collaboration projects between art and science.

Futures museum

Border between historical collections and co-creation of futures in museums

Cultural change is unavoidable. Museums collect pieces of changed tangible and intangible traditions in their collections. These pieces of cultural heritage build our understanding of ourselves, our identities and our culture as well as changes in all of these. The aim of our presentation is to investigate if it is possible also to build understanding of different alternative futures as a part of activities in museums. Alternative futures has always a connection to past and current identities and culture. However, futures are not usually a part of museum collections or activities.

Our questions are: what could be the possibilities of museums to co-create alternative futures on the base of traditions and cultural heritage in cooperation with neighbouring communities of museums and museum visitors? Is it possible to choose some value based futures in this kind of co-creative process, as example sustainable futures?

The research material consists of material co-created in futures workshops organized together with partners in different Finnish museums. As a result we will have new conceptual insights to heritage futures, materialized in the combination of tangible and intangible museum collections, heritage and ideas about alternative futures. With this concept we will describe the possibilities of a conceptual and practical change in heritage processes. Our results will provide also new knowledge for transformative sustainability processes in everyday life in different communities and the potential role of museums in these processes.

Alex Snellman

Dr. Alex Snellman is the coordinator of the Finnish Network for Artefact Studies. He is a postdoctoral researcher in history. His ongoing postdoctoral project ‘In the Clothes of Imperial Power: Constructing Society through Civil Uniforms 1809–1917’ analyses Finnish civil uniforms as a comprehensive material system.

Borders between exhibition paradigms: traditional ideas or current trends?

There are many ways to answer the challenges posed by recent political, social, technological and cultural changes in a museum exhibition. In my presentation, I am going analyse recent museum exhibitions using concepts that on the other hand have been used to describe contemporary society in Europe and North America and on the other hand which I believe to be relevant to Finnish museums in particular.

I will analyse, whether the exhibitions are popular or populist: intended for wide audiences and making complicated scholarly subjects understandable or pandering to the masses and oversimplifying their substance. I will seek to determine, whether they are factual or postfactual (emotional): using emotions to reach the visitor and connect her/him to the facts or using emotions either instead of the factual substance or even in order to conceal it.

As the coordinator of the Finnish Network for Artefact Studies, I am worried how objects are losing their self-evident position in a museum exhibition. That trend is connected to the decline of concrete artefact studies during the representational paradigm of the 1990s, as those university disciplines which educated museum professionals shifted their focus from objects to immaterial phenomena.

I am also trying to define how ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ are present and presented in exhibitions. I have earlier (Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 3/2016) argued that as we call Finnish historical museums ‘cultural-history museums’ it might distort their self-image in relation to political history.

My presentation will shed new light to the interconnectedness of recent changes in society and culture and the ways a museum exhibition responds to them. Should we lower the bar, if the population is becoming less educated and even less knowledgeable – as reported recently in Finland? Can a museum exhibition still demand something from the visitor or is it simply a form of entertainment?

Årstein Svihus

Årstein Svihus, born in 1971. Historian, and has has worked in Museum Vest (Bergen) since 2007. Leader of the Norwegian Fisheries Museum (a department in Museum Vest) 2010-2016, head of research in Museum Vest since 2014. For the time being on leave to work as a PhD-student at the University of Bergen.

Leena Svinhufvud, Susanna Thiel

Leena Svinhufvud: Educational Curator, Designmuseum, Helsinki. She is art historian by training and completed her PhD in 2009 on the modernization of applied art in Finland. She is also an active researcher and teacher of design history and has curated several exhibitions of textile art.

Susanna Thiel: Curator, Desingmuseum, Helsinki

A Lappish ring in the Design Museum. On the Liminality of Museum Objects

In the collection of the Design Museum Helsinki (former Museum of Applied Arts, founded in 1873) there is a silver ring from Lapland, dating from the 19th century. By type, it is a "Lappish ring" ("Lapinsormus") which is the popular name for a silver ring with small hanging loops – in Finland (re)produced still today by Kalevala Jewelry company, after original museum pieces. Similar rings were used during a long period of time by various Sàmi culture groups in Norway, Sweden and Finland.

The ring in question was donated to the collection in conjunction with the First Industrial Arts Exhibition in Helsinki in 1881, by count Carl Robert Mannerheim (1835–1914). The Society of Crafts and Design – owner of the museum collection – consisted of members of the Swedish-speaking cultural elite and the early collection represents their material culture. In this case, the ring illustrates a fashionable "touristic approach" to collecting Sàmi objects in the 19th century and exoticism in preserving material culture of the "other", the indigenous people of the North.

In the 21st century, the "Lappish ring" is an anomaly in the Design Museum collection, disconnected and strange especially in relation to the contemporary idea of – the iconic – Finnish design. This is an "original" Sàmi object. We do not know (yet) who made the ring and where, nor do we know of the designer.

However, in a museum even design objects are not only specimens of serial production but also authentic objects with individual histories. We argue that the "Lappish ring" is a valuable "relic" of previous collection policies and because of these processes, also a relevant object of Finnish design history.

The history of this ring exemplifies the liminality of museum objects: objects move from one category to other, their status is not singular but changes constantly in the "rites" of collecting. We can observe how the status of the "Lappish ring" has been defined by many generations of museum professionals. On the threshold of change even today we ask, how does the topical ethnopolitical debate around ownership of Sámi heritage participate in this process.

Suzie Thomas

Suzie Thomas is Professor of Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Helsinki. She has been involved with teaching Museum Studies in Helsinki since 2014. Suzie gained her PhD in heritage studies from Newcastle University, UK, in 2009. She is the Co-Editor of the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, and has research interests in community engagement, difficult issues in museum and heritage interpretation, museum security, and digital heritage. Twitter handle: @SuzieThomasHY